Islander

AN NCS PREMIERE: DIABOLUS INCARNATE — “HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN”

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Jan 142026
 

(written by Islander)

Diabolus Incarnate is a long-running extreme metal project with roots in South Africa, now based in the UK. They were first formed in 2010, and Metal-Archives identifies a 2015 demo and a 2016 single as their output until now. Obviously, they haven’t rushed things, but now, 10 years since they arrived in the UK and with a current incarnation that brings together musicians best known for their work in other extreme metal bands, Diabolus Incarnate are ready to take a big step forward.

The band’s founder Dieter Engel is now accompanied by members of such bands as Fleshgod Apocalypse, Ingested, and Worm Shepherd, and we’re told that they have two EPs under way, with one at the mixing stage and another in pre-production. What we have for you today is the premiere of a fully finished single, “Human, All Too Human“, along with statements about the song by all four bandmembers. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2025’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 9): IN MOURNING, CYTOTOXIN, JORDSJUK

 Exceptions to the Rule, MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2025  No Responses »
Jan 142026
 

(written by Islander)

We’re at another installment of this list where I don’t really have any organizing principle to explain why I put these three songs together. They’re just three songs I thought deserved to be on the list, and they happen to come from three really good 2025 albums too, but each one sounds very different from the other two. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2025’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 8): THEMATA, VICTIM OF FIRE, HVRT

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2025  4 Responses »
Jan 132026
 

(written by Islander)

As I’ve repeatedly stated (to protect the innocent), this is MY list, not some kind of list of THE SITE. But while my own tastes and listening habits drive things, I do try to pay attention to what our readers have suggested, as well as what got our other writers pumped up. That’s pretty much what drove me to package these next three songs together:

Yesterday’s segment was likely to make DGR happy, and today’s installment should make Andy Synn happy… unless he thinks I fucked up and picked the wrong songs from these three albums. Well, we’ll see….

But what I really hope is that these selections will make YOU happy when you hear them. And to be clear, I’m still driving this bus. While my co-writers helped steer me toward these albums and songs, I genuinely did find them very catchy, memorable, infectious in different ways. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: HOLOTROPIC — “IN_DIVIDUAL – PT. I: ANIMAL”

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Jan 132026
 

(written by Islander)

This is something of a very long-awaited reunion for us. It was almost exactly 11 years ago that I became captivated by an album named permeate by a band from Slovakia named holotropic, an album that I briefly summed up as “a blend of technical death metal, progressive metal, jazz, Eastern melody, and crazy shit.”

That permeate album was very well-received both in the band’s home and abroad, and they supported it with performances in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary. As time passed, the band’s lineup also changed, and currently members and ex-members of bands such as 0N0, God Defamer, and Catastrofy can be seen performing on stage with them. And while the time that has passed since holotropic’s last release has been significant, they did not stop writing new music, some of which they’ve incorporated into their setlists.

At last, the band are ready to release new songs. We’re told that they recently finished recording material for what should have been a shorter EP but in the end turned out to be 30+ minutes of music, and what we have for you today is an excellent sign of their achievements — the video premiere of the first part of a tripartite song named “in_dividual“.

(By the way, although my English training tells me to capitalize proper names and titles, I’ll defer to the band’s tendencies not to do that — except in this post title). Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2025: DANIEL BARKASI’S 25 CUTS OF 25!

 LISTMANIA 2025  4 Responses »
Jan 132026
 

(For our final LISTMANIA installment of for 2025 [other than the still-evolving infectious song list], we present Daniel Barkasi’s Top 25 list.)

Arriving at the tail-end of Listmania is the one you haven’t been waiting for. Yup, it’s my year-end list of stuff that kept me going for another spin ‘round the record that is life. I chronicle my recent happenings in my monthly Obscurities column, so yes, we’re going to subject you to a quick synopsis.

This is being written post-move to the mountains and frigid cold of West Virginia. Unpacking will take a while, and most of my end-of-year downtime has been spent packing, moving, and unpacking. Not exactly relaxing as we’d like to unwind before going back to the day job, but it had to be done, and we’re settling in nicely. The pups and cats are doing great, and the sheep/pigs have a lot more space (and warm enclosures to shield them from this). I’m sure the new neighbors have enjoyed my cursing the high winds and temperatures in the teens we’ve endured the last few days. Being a Florida resident for a decade certainly changes one’s perspective on temperature, and I’ll be spending as much indoor time as possible until March or April. Whenever it becomes suitable for a human to exit the house. Continue reading »

THE BEST METAL ALBUM OF 2025 (RAFI’S PICK): TRIVAX — “THE GREAT SATAN”

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Jan 132026
 

Artwork by Nestor Avalos; recommended for fans of Melechesh, Behemoth, Dark Fortress

(Last month Israeli metal writer Rafi Yovell made his reviewing debut at NCS, and while he hasn’t brought us a year-end list to share in our nearly completed 2025 LISTMANIA series, he has enthusiastically identified his album of the year.)

Black metal almost always comes with rage for religious fanaticism, regardless of where or when you’d argue the genre began. Fascinatingly enough, though, I think the Middle East was where black metal would reach its conceptual summit.

There have been many great black metal releases from the region, but last year the Iranian-born but now UK-based Trivax blessed us with one of the best extreme metal records I’ve ever heard.

Surely, I wouldn’t be the first to point out that awesome metal tends to flourish from hardship. And my pick for the best metal album of 2025? Holy fucking J’hannam, The Great Satan takes that concept to a whole other level… Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: RAVENMOCKER — “INFALLIBLE”

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Jan 122026
 

(written by Islander)

Ravenmocker will be a new name for most of you. They are a melodic death metal band founded in Southern California just this year  by guitarist/vocalist Tom Tierney (formerly of Thrown Into Exile), joined by guitarist George Patmas (ex‑Dianthus), drummer Dylan Suierveld (Levinia), and bassist Will Buckley (Levinia, Anubis).

The band preview their music by identifying influences that include Children of Bodom, Insomnium, Amon Amarth, Kalmah, and Dark Tranquillity, but they also identify unexpected flavors brought into their collaborative songwriting process by each member — including aspects of country, jazz fusion, blues, funk, and classical choral music. And they were motivated in part by “a desire to carve out a culturally rooted identity inspired by Native American lore”.

To introduce themselves to the global metal community Ravenmocker will be releasing two singles — “Infallible” and “Where the Raven Flies” — that lead into their first EP, and what we’ve got for you today is an official video for the first of those songs, “Infallible“. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2025: TO THE TEETH’S “LIST OF LISTS”

 LISTMANIA 2025  10 Responses »
Jan 122026
 

(written by Islander)

We aren’t quite finished with our 2025 LISTMANIA series, but we’re getting very close. As we’ve neared the end in many previous years, we’ve included a “List of Lists” assembled by Dutch writer Peter van der Ploeg for his To the Teeth metal blog, which began life in May of 2016, originally on Facebook and eventually expanding to SubStack, and this year we’re sharing his List of Lists again.

As in the past, Peter explains that he began the exercise by assembling a population of year-end lists from an international group of music sites. For the 2025 endeavor, he identified the following sources:

This year I’ve counted the relevant lists from Album of the Year, Angry Metal Guy (AN Grier, Steel Druhm), Bandcamp, Brooklyn Vegan, Consequence of Sound, Decibel, Invisible Oranges (Colin Dempsey, Josh Rioux), Meat Mead Metal, Metal Hammer, Metal Injection, Metal Storm, MetalSucks, No Clean Singing (Gonzo, Will Cifer), No Echo, Popmatters, Rolling Stone, Stereogum, The Needle Drop, The Quietus, To The Teeth, Toilet ov Hell, Treble and Zes Losse Tanden. Some magazines or blogs publish a lot of personal lists: I included a maximum of two, to prevent publication bias.

Altogether, these lists included a total of almost 300 albums. Peter then assigned point values to the selections based on the rankings they received at their original locations. He explains: Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2025’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 7): CRYPTOPSY, LIK, SYNAPTIC

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2025  No Responses »
Jan 122026
 

(written by Islander)

A new week begins and so we resume the rollout of this 2025 Most Infectious Song list. With this Part 7 the number of songs climbs to 21.

For this installment I decided to lean into death metal, very different flavors of death metal to be sure, but each track a neck-wrecker. These choices ought to make my comrade DGR particularly happy, but hopefully many of you as well — though I quickly admit that the three albums from which I extracted these songs were home to lots of other infectious ones too. Continue reading »

BEZDAN: “UPON THE ALTAR”

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Jan 122026
 

(Our Norway-based contributor Chile has brought us his first review of 2026, and the subject is the long-awaited debut album by the Croatian extremists Bezdan.)

Where did the time go? Well, that’s not really a rhetorical question. Listmania 2025 started happening and the wheels just seemed to fell off my proverbial writing wagon, so the time mostly went with me pouring over all the published lists and scratching my head at how the hell did I miss this or that album. Nevertheless, as a wise man said once: “Metal is never late, nor is it early. It arrives precisely when it means to”. Or something like that.

As another wise man said once (or twice) on these very pages, it seems like we do spend a lot of our time here at NCS playing catch-up, so here we go once again. This review would have been better suited to have happened around the time of the actual release date of this album back in late November or at least early December, but time is relative anyway, as we are about to find out. Continue reading »

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